


Run Boy, Run

by sithblood



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Other, This is really dumb, just a character study b4 i start writing srs stuff, no romance just kylo being emo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 05:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5773339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sithblood/pseuds/sithblood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how Ben Solo became Kylo Ren. </p><p>(Just a short dumb character study of my fave trashy boy before I start writing anything actually good or worthwhile.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Boy, Run

**Author's Note:**

> ok so this is my first fanfic ever posted online and i don't know what i'm doing at all, so apologies for that. i figured i'd ease myself into full-on sinning so i wrote a quick character study of kylo ren because i actually like him for some reason. this is un-beta'd or whatever so feel free to point out any mistakes.

Ben Solo was only a boy.

 

He couldn’t remember when he started hearing voices in his head, or if it had even started at all. For all he knew, he could have been born that way – strange, defective, doubtful; careful and prudent and always second-guessing, over-analysing. Who could he trust? What could he do?

 

Certain pressures and expectations accompanied being the child of two war heroes, obviously. He was product of a revolution so powerful it shook the Galaxy and brought an Empire to its knees, a manifestation of everything inherently good and pure in the world, an implication of success, a suggestion of triumph and victory. He was never Ben, always Han and Leia’s kid. Which war could he possibly win for his parents’ cause? How could he possible build a legacy of his own if there were no battles left to fight?

 

When forces beyond his comprehension began to tear him apart from the inside, when a silent battle of his own waged a bloody path through the perilous territory of his mind, when he wanted nothing more than the comfort and reassurance of his parents, to be told that he wasn’t a stranger in this family of legacies, he was sent away. To him, that parting felt like it could be nothing but final.

 

During the time spent with Luke, it felt infinitely worse. Curious eyes and hushed whispers followed his every footstep, the shadow of his parents looming before him as a constant, unflinching reminder of how unworthy he was to carry the name Solo. He was slow and angry and rife with raw, potential power, which only served to frustrate him further, the rift between him and his family splintering, crumbling, widening.

 

Ben knew he could never truly belong among these honourable, honourable faces; people who had no internal conflict, who were so certain of which path their life would take, who knew no struggle or fury or resentment. Ben knew he didn’t deserve to be a Solo, didn’t deserve to be a Jedi, and didn’t deserve his parents’ revolution.

 

When Snoke found him, weak and vulnerable and in so much pain, he told Ben that he deserved more than the fleeting memory of a fumbling, half-baked rebellion, more than the teachings of a man like Luke, and so much more than the Light could offer him. He had so much of his grandfather in him, he’d said, so much power and desire and raw emotion. He could become a Sith, just like Anakin had become Darth Vader so many years before. And then Ben Solo died, and from his ruins rose Kylo Ren, finally free from a burden he never even knew he had been carrying.

 

He felt most comfortable with a Lightsaber in his hand, laying waste to anyone who dared challenge him, because his agony and pain and fury became blinding, white-hot; a pillar of raw, primal power which surrounded his person, forever strengthening his connection to the Dark Side. He wore a mask because the face of the man beneath it had died along with Luke Skywalker’s apprentices all those years ago; because he did not want his enemies’ last sight to be that of Han and Leia’s son.

 

It started with a pilot, a droid, and a Stormtrooper. He felt the Light in Poe Dameron’s feeble mind as he tore memory upon memory from inside him, trembled at the image of his mother’s face, proud and aged and somber as she spoke to Poe, her eyes resigned and weary from a lifetime of loss. He wanted to crush this man’s mind to pieces, tear it apart and leave him a shaking, incomprehensible mess. Instead, Kylo pressed on until he retrieved what he needed.

 

The girl was stronger than she knew, Kylo realised. He wouldn’t be able to take what he needed from her, not now that his strength was wavering and the Light was beckoning to him, a persistent flicker at the edges of his fraying consciousness. She too was struggling, he knew, aching from the absence of a family she never had the chance to know, struggling to stay afloat in the flood of power that was awakening within. She was, in so many ways, just like him, and yet when he entered her mind the Light was almost blinding, splintering the shaking resolve of his Darkness like nothing he had ever anticipated. How pathetic, he thought to himself. After all these years, and just as weak.

 

Kylo Ren was many things – a murderer, a Sith, a traitor to his family – but underneath his mask and his robes and his years of training, he was just a frightened little boy who had never really belonged.

 

Everything had been building up to this, he supposed. The entire Galaxy was holding its breath, watching, waiting, suffocating Kylo where he stood. Maybe this was what it felt like to die.

 

“Ben,” he’d said, like they’d never spent a day apart, like he was still eight years old and capable of loving without the fear of falling apart, like he was someone worth saving. Kylo pitied his father’s blind trust in the memory of a child he once knew.

 

Because, beneath it all, he was just a boy. He was Ben Solo, the son of a revolution. He was Kylo Ren, a faceless, merciless killer, a loyal servant to the First Order and his Knights. He was just as much his grandfather as his was his mother; the struggles of Light and Dark compressed into a single body and unleashed upon the world. He was neither good nor bad, just the temptation of power and free will spun into the shape of a man. He hung on the axis of both extremes, a long-tortured soul with only one choice left to make.

 

In the end, he wasn’t sure if it was Ben or Kylo who ran his father through with a Lightsaber and killed him. Either way, he had chosen. He would – could - never return to the Light now.


End file.
